In the bowels of this spanking new theatre lurks an intimate performance space, with a well-stocked bar: the ideal setting for this 70-minute, one-man play, written by Mike Davis and Rob Crouch and performed by the latter, that retails the life and times of the famously thirsty Oliver Reed. It's highly entertaining, but what is offered as a jaunty celebration of a boozing actor struck me as a faintly tragic portrait of a desperate man.

The conceit of the show is that we catch Reed in his last hours in a Maltese pub while he's on location for Gladiator. Sensing the end is near, Reed looks back over a ramshackle life that brought him movie stardom. He claims descent from the Victorian actor-manager Beerbohm Tree; recalls his athletic prowess at school where, because of his dyslexia, he was classified as a dunce; and describes how he found himself through acting and the loyal support of directors such as Ken Russell and Michael Winner. There's no doubt Reed had a rugged, Heathcliff-like power on screen, and led the life he chose. But the show glosses over his later decline, where he made cheapo movies in apartheid South Africa, and it never convincingly answers the question once posed by Clive James on a TV chat show: "Tell me, Oliver, why do you drink?"

Crouch, who first bounces on stage in a gorilla suit, engages directly with the audience and vividly captures the contradictions of this strange man: the posh, public-school accent mixes with a democratic love of pub life; and the primeval attitude to women – which once led Shelley Winters to pour whisky over his head on the Johnny Carson show – combines with what seems like a genuine love for his two wives. But, highly enjoyable as the show is, it leaves me feeling that there is nothing sadder than an ageing hell-raiser, and that Reed sacrificed a genuine talent in order to become a legend in his own mind.

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